Marcellus Claudius
20. M. Claudius Marcellus Aeserninus, M. F., son of the preceding. When a boy he broke his leg while acting in the Trojan games before Augustus, a circumstance of which his grandfather, Asinius Pollio, complained so loudly that the custom was abolished. (Suet. Oct. 43.) He was trained with much care by his grandfather in all kinds of oratorical exercises, and gave much promise as an orator. (Senec. Epit. Control. lib. iv. praef.) In A. D. 20 he was one of those whom Piso requested to undertake his defence on the charge of having poisoned Germanicus, but he declined the office. (Tac. Ann 3.11.) It is probable that ASINIUS MARCELLUS who is mentioned by Tacitus (Tac. Ann. 14.40) as a great-grandson of Pollio, was a son of this Aeserninus.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.